


in out up down

by triggerswaggiehavoc



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Existentialism, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Humor, Injury Recovery, M/M, Memory Loss, Slice of Life, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 23:46:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13259130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triggerswaggiehavoc/pseuds/triggerswaggiehavoc
Summary: To forget, to remember, to live, to die. They're all jumbled up lately, and Wonwoo can't seem to remember what the difference is.





	in out up down

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt #148: Soonyoung and Wonwoo are patients in the hospital, both suffering from memory loss caused by completely separate accidents. They struggle to regain their memories, but end up creating new ones instead.
> 
> uhhh suspend your disbelief a little bit i'll say right up front i'm no medical professional or hospital expert so i'm sorry if i've made any grating mistake. please just let me slide on it this time!!

They tell him his name is Wonwoo, and he believes them. He has no choice. He doesn’t remember.

All he remembers is waking up with three different tubes in him and a terrible migraine pressing at his eyes. Two different doctors come to speak to him amid the flurry of nurses and other unfamiliar faces crowding his tiny room at the hospital, and they both say the same thing: he’s so lucky he survived an accident like that, so fortunate to have made such a full recovery. Wonwoo doesn’t know if he can count not being able to remember anything from before he woke up as a full recovery, and he doesn’t know whether he really feels lucky. What he does know is that the room is stuffy and he wants to leave, but they’re still not letting him.

People who claim to be his family fuss about him from the minute he wakes up until they decide they’ll be okay to go home for the night and check on things. He’s grateful when they do. It’s too loud, way too loud, and he doesn’t know any of them the way they seem to think they know him. When he’s got his quiet back, he leans back onto the pillow at the helm of his hospital bed and wheezes out a thin breath. With a shaky tongue, he tests the sound out on the air.

“Wonwoo.”

It echoes forever in the unlit room, bounces off every wall and back into his ears, settles in the pit of his stomach. It sounds strange. The feeling of it on his lips is strange, too, though he guesses people don’t normally say their own names. Unless they’re introducing themselves. Which he guesses he can do now. Eyes on the starless ceiling, he repeats it a few more times to test the waters. When it stops sounding like a name, he lays his head back a little farther and tries for sleep.

In the morning, he decides he’s tired of sitting. He’s been lying in this bed for who knows how long, hasn’t used his legs at all, and the longer he goes without using them, the more scared he is they won’t work. So, with no supervision and a determined grunt, he heaves himself from the cot and plants his feet on the tile.

It’s cold, and he doesn’t have any socks on, but blood rushes right to his shins, and god is he glad to be standing. He manages a feeble squat or two before deciding to take this pair of legs on the road. _On the road_ really just means to the tiny bathroom connected to his current room, but it’s a new sight nonetheless, one he’s never seen before. Wheeling his little IV drip alongside him, he steps in with toes curling away from the cold and flicks the light on.

There’s a mirror lining one wall, and he doesn’t know why he wasn’t expecting one to be there, but it catches him off-guard. In it stands another guy with his own IV drip standing upright beside him. Wonwoo knows as much about mirrors at least to know this guy is him, but it’s hard to process. Is this really what he looks like? His fingers find his jaw and crawl up it, back down his neck, reach out to touch the glass like it might suck him through to the other side. Sure enough, his reflection does everything the exact same way. He clears his throat.

“Wonwoo.” It almost feels like having a conversation, the way he’s locked on his own eyes, lips just moving to mumble out the name a few times. He answered—or more like tried to answer—a lot of questions yesterday, but now it feels like he’s really talking. His palm flattens over the silver, and everything is so cold.

“Wonwoo?” This time the voice is not his. Behind the Wonwoo in the mirror, he can see a reflected version of one of the doctors who came to speak with him yesterday. He can’t remember her name. “What are you doing?”

“Not much, doc,” he says, lips cracking into a grin that surprises him. “Just planning my escape.” His open palm folds itself into a fist that raps its knuckles on the glass before he swivels around to face his guest. He ignores the way blood rushes behind his ears. “Say, don’t you think I’m pretty handsome?”

“Oh, sure.” She smiles when she says it, but it’s not happy. Doesn’t reach her eyes. The word sympathy comes to Wonwoo’s mind, and it settles bitter in the floor of his skull. “Before you escape, would you mind coming in here to sit down for a talk with your parents?”

“I’m tired of sitting down.” What he means is that he doesn’t want to have a talk with people he doesn’t know, with faces that remind him of his own, with worried eyes and good-natured frowns. The doctor probably doesn’t want to hear that, though.

“You can stand.” And that’s not what he wants to hear, either, but he follows her back into the other room obediently.

Having now seen himself, his parents do resemble him chillingly; rather, he’s the one who resembles them, he guesses. It stresses him out to think he looks so similar to people he has no recollection of, so instead he watches the doctor. She’s telling them about a program they’ve got in mind for him, something over in the psychiatric ward. He’ll stay for a few weeks, she says, meet with a doctor every day to try and dredge up some memories, get him ready to go back into the world on his own feet, and then they’ll discharge him to the land of the free. The plan doesn’t sound too bad on the first listen, but the more he runs it through his ears, the less he likes the idea of it. He doesn’t want to stay at the hospital any longer than he has to, even if it does mean going home with strangers. Unfortunately, the strangers look sold on the idea.

“We’ll come visit,” his alleged mother tells him as they say their goodbyes. She wraps her arms around him in a hug, but it’s cold and unfeeling, only gives him a sense of how empty his chest is. “We love you so much.

“Yeah.” It’d be too much work to say he loves them too, so he doesn’t try. Once they’re gone, the doctor ushers him to his new room in the opposite wing of the hospital.

 

The best thing about being relocated is that he doesn’t have to stay hooked up to any machines anymore. Some other notable good things are that he’s now on the second floor instead of the sixth, with a good window through which he can view the park across the street and its neighboring gas station, and that he’s only about two minutes of walking away from the hospital’s cafeteria. The worst things are that he still can’t leave the hospital and he still has to wear the stupid gown even though nothing is wrong with him.

At least they let him wear pants under it. His parents show up the next day with an entire crate of pants assumed to be from the home he has never seen, sweatpants and jeans and even the odd pair of formal slacks thrown in, though he doesn’t have a belt and probably still wouldn’t wear them even if he did. He learns about himself that he wears briefs. It is only just after discovering this and also pulling his skinny legs into a pair of athletic track pants with white racing stripes on the side that a shiny-eyed doctor comes in to speak to him, different from both he’s already met.

“Howdy, Wonwoo,” he says, tiptoeing through the door like he’s worried about waking up a sleeping rabbit on the bed. Though he’s hardly done a thing, Wonwoo already thinks he’s more suited to pediatrics than psychiatrics. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” Wonwoo tells him, squinting at the ID dangling from the end of his lanyard. “Dr. Hong.”

“Just Josh is fine,” the doctor tells him with a wide grin. “We’re pals, alright?” Wonwoo gets the sense he’s being treated like a child, and it hits him that he doesn’t know how old he is. You think you’ll never forget some things, but then you go and… have an accident. He rakes his brain for that one, but it’s not the amnesia that’s getting him this time. Nobody’s told him what happened. Goosebumps raise all along his arms.

“Alright,” Wonwoo concedes. “Say, do you know how old I am?”

Dr. Josh’s smile weakens a little at the lukewarm reception of his friendship but checks his clipboard anyway. “You’re nineteen.”

“When’s my birthday?” He checks the board again.

“July 17th.”

“What day is today?” With every question, Dr. Josh looks a little less warm and a lot more worried, but Wonwoo can hardly help being curious. Instead of the clipboard, this time he looks Wonwoo dead in the eyes.

“June second.”

“Oh, cool. So I’m almost twenty.”

“That you are.” He smiles again. “So, why don’t you tell me what exactly you can remember before you got here?”

It’s because his face is so despairingly sincere that Wonwoo wants to lie to him, to make something up, but he doesn’t have the heart or the imaginative quickness. As much as he combs through his gray matter, he can’t snag on anything significant, just the black stretch of eyelids right before he woke up and the colorless buzz of the hospital room right after. Not a single shirt he owns, a pet he’s ever had, his address, his phone number. It’s all gone, pastel chalk rained off a square of sidewalk.

“Is it normal to forget this much?” Wonwoo asks him after a few painful minutes of questions and no answers. It’s like bleeding turnips, and Wonwoo feels bad that he has no veins.

“Not exactly,” Dr. Josh tells him. There’s no denying the worried way his eyebrows draw together, but he wipes it away and pulls on a smile instead, one that almost seems totally real. “But it’s not always a bad thing not to be normal, yeah?”

“I guess.” In this case, though, Wonwoo thinks it may be.

 

Three days later is when Dr. Josh strides boldly into Wonwoo’s room, eyes refreshed in their sparkle. He doesn’t have the clipboard in his hands, which leads Wonwoo to assume the usual fruitless interrogation has been taken off the menu, but if that’s the case, he doesn’t know what’s coming. Though the thin mattress on the hospital bed numbs him in every way, he stays seated resolutely atop it, legs crossed beneath his starchy blanket in a cold pair of denim jeans.

“How would you feel about making a friend?” Dr. Josh asks him. For a good minute, Wonwoo is too busy processing the question to think about answering it.

A friend. Obviously, he doesn’t have any of those, and he certainly wasn’t expecting his doctor to tell him to get one, but maybe it’s not a terrible idea. Not like he talks to anyone anyway except his parents and Dr. Josh. He doesn’t even know what it’s like to talk to someone closer to his own age. Assuming the friend Dr. Josh has in mind is even close to his own age.

“I guess that’s cool.”

“Great!” Dr. Josh claps and points an enthusiastic finger gun directly between Wonwoo’s ears. “I think it’ll be really helpful for you two to talk to each other. So come with me and we’ll go meet him.”

“Right now?”

“There’s no wrong time to make a friend, Wonwoo!”

When he’s got his slippers on, they shuffle out the door and down the hall, further around the edge of the psychiatric ward. Dr. Josh leads with sure steps, coat fluttering around his knees while they walk forward beneath unfeeling fluorescent bulbs. Nobody passes them on their trip down the hall but two scrub-clad nurses poring over thick stacks of vital information, and the emptiness augments the sound of their footsteps tenfold. The hard clack of Dr. Josh’s dress shoes and the hushed smack of Wonwoo’s rubber hospital slippers, echoing endlessly through a hallway that stretches onward and into itself eternal. A perfect metronome of nothing.

They stop at a door not unlike the one to Wonwoo’s own room, unspectacularly denoted 237 by a placard on the wall beside it. Dr. Josh pushes the door open without knocking, and Wonwoo finds himself unable to recall whether he ever knocks on his door or not. Not like he needs to, Wonwoo guesses, since he doesn’t really need permission to do his job. Somehow, the thought makes the back of his neck itch.

Dr. Josh is saying something to the room, but Wonwoo isn’t listening to it. It throws him how every hospital room is totally the same, all dull gray and duller off-white, all sterile, all cold. There are probably plenty of other inpatients at this hospital, he imagines. Surely they can’t all be drowning in this just alike. Somebody somewhere has to have something to color the room, don’t they? That’s a sad way to recover when you’re really sick. A sad way to remember the world when you’ve never seen it before.

Only when Wonwoo hears an unfamiliar voice does he recall there’s someone else in the room apart from himself and his doctor, and his eyes flick to the bed, where a kid sits cross-legged dead in the center of the mattress. Talk about color. His hair is a dazzling shade somewhere on the spectrum between cherry red and blazing pink, and Wonwoo’s eyes take a second to adjust and take it in, get past the hair to look at the rest of him. Objectively, Wonwoo doesn’t figure he could look any more different from the reflection he met in the mirror a few days ago. Cheeks full and soft, jawline smooth and rounded, eyes twinkling. An earring dangles from one ear, and Wonwoo wonders if any of his other friends have earrings. He’s assuming he has other friends.

“Wonwoo,” Dr. Josh says. He kind of sounds like he’s rounding off the end of a sentence and also like he isn’t. Wonwoo blinks at him.

“Yes?”

“Soonyoung.” He smiles and swings his arm toward the kid on the bed, who also smiles. What a set of teeth. Wonwoo has to squint. “You two are both going through something similar,” Dr. Josh very vaguely explains, “so I hope you can get along.”

“Nice to meet you,” Soonyoung says, extending a doughy hand. His palm is soft when Wonwoo grabs it.

“Yeah, you too.” Meeting new people has probably always been this hard.

Dr. Josh glances between them an easy ten or twelve times each before huffing out a breath. “Well, I don’t want you to feel like I’m babysitting you, so I’ll get going.”

Truthfully, Wonwoo wishes he would stay a bit longer—it’s way too awkward—but he leaves anyway, clicking back into the hall on the soles of his shiny shoes. Then there is Wonwoo and there is Soonyoung, a stiff meter apart, both eyeing each other up and neither speaking. Wonwoo doesn’t want to have to be the one to break the ice. After a minute, Soonyoung coughs.

“Say,” he starts, “can I ask you something a little weird?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t you think it’s, like, not fair how Dr. Josh”—Wonwoo can’t help but feel a little comfort that the happy medium of Dr. Josh is common—“is so handsome and also is a doctor? Like, it’s not even realistic.”

Wonwoo cracks a smile without meaning to. “I guess you’re right.” What a funny thing to feel outrage about. Soonyoung must think so, too, because he grins back, fingertips drumming on his knees. Outside in the hallway, a cart with squeaky wheels rolls by, pushed by a nurse who hums while she walks. Soonyoung swings his legs over the edge of the bed.

“Do you want to go get something to eat?”

 

The cafeteria gives Wonwoo a little bit of a headache when he walks in, pressing right at the backs of his eyelids, but he can’t figure out why. Maybe because it’s loud. Maybe because it’s busy. Maybe because it seems like it should be so familiar, like he should know this atmosphere from somewhere, but his brain can’t quite drag the memory out. It doesn’t matter why. He follows Soonyoung closely to the line and tries not to think too much about it.

It’s relatively quiet where they sit down, not quite as jumbled as the square of tables brimming with rowdy children and exhausted parents, but it doesn’t do much to abate the pounding in Wonwoo’s head. Lunch today is nothing exciting—green beans and cheap bulk pizza with a dessert of unsweet applesauce—and Wonwoo has to work hard to do more than just prod everything back and forth over his tray with a plastic fork. Across from him, Soonyoung eats like he hasn’t seen a meal in days.

“So,” he begins with a cough, spearing a forkful of green beans, “Dr. Josh said we’re going through something similar.” Wonwoo waits for the question, but it doesn’t come. Mouth full of green beans, Soonyoung just eyes him expectantly.

“Yeah?”

“Does that mean you forgot things, too?”

It’s a simple question, but it makes Wonwoo’s wrists stiffen. Of course he’s forgotten things, and of course the doctors told him just that, and of course he knows it by now. Somehow, though, it’s a little different to have someone ask, to have someone tack _too_ on the end of the question like it’s something usual. Soonyoung sounds so nonchalant, nibbling at the crust off his bland cheese pizza, and it makes Wonwoo’s ribs ache. For the emptiness he thinks he should feel, maybe. For the way the glimmer in Soonyoung’s eyes dulls when he asks it, maybe. The little cup of applesauce is suddenly very appealing.

“Yeah, I did,” he says. Soonyoung nods slowly while he eats. “How much… I mean, like, how much did you forget?”

“Me?” Soonyoung swallows. “I remember my eleventh birthday, but not anything after that.”

“Eleventh?”

“I mean, I remember the cake.” He turns his fork through the air in abstract circles, collecting invisible spaghetti. “It had two of those big one candles on it, so I’m figuring it was my eleventh birthday. I remember my grandma was there and I got three sets of Hot Wheels. I wonder if I still have them somewhere.” With a flick of his wrist, he sends the imaginary spaghetti glob into the wall and pierces a few more green beans. “What about you?”

“I don’t remember anything.”

“Really?” Soonyoung gawks, jaw hanging limp, fork frozen halfway to his mouth with five green beans speared on its prongs. “Not anything?”

“Nope.” Wonwoo watches Soonyoung’s wrist, watches it unfreeze and continue his fork on its mouthward journey, and he gets the sense that he’s being looked at differently now. Soonyoung chews slowly for a long time, forehead betraying just a hint of a wrinkle.

“That sucks,” he says at last. He looks like he really means it, and Wonwoo feels like he’s taken a spike to the liver. “That really, really sucks.”

“I guess.”

“Well, hey.” Soonyoung brightens up, but his smile is too obviously forced. Even Wonwoo can see that. “At least you’re alive, right?”

After nudging it back and forth to eternity, Wonwoo finally lets his little cup of applesauce sit still so he can dive his plastic spoon into it. It tastes like someone smashed the least sweet apple they could find with a hammer and scooped it onto his tray, barely pausing to pluck the seeds out, and he doesn’t want to swallow. Before he can spit it out, though, he remembers that he is almost twenty years old, and twenty-year-olds don’t spit up applesauce just because it’s gross. While it slides down his throat, he wonders if just being alive is enough.

 

Wonwoo is sitting on his bed when Soonyoung barges in the next day. It’s only minutes after Dr. Josh leaves from his daily fruitless conversation, and Wonwoo’s knees are pulled to his chest while he tries to chew through the first chapter of a book his parents left in a box they brought along with his pants. It’s one they said he used to really like, and he’s hopeful reading it again might help him remember how much he liked it before, but it’s hard to get a feel for it when Soonyoung loudly shoves the door open after only seven pages.

“Hey!” he hollers, hands on his hips. Wonwoo’s fingers tense around the book as a reflex, but he keeps his face calm.

“Hi.”

“You don’t seem that surprised to see me.”

“Trust me.” Wonwoo snaps the book shut and straightens himself, flattening his legs back down toward the mattress. “I’m very surprised.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He waits for Soonyoung to get to the point, but he looks really proud of his successful surprise attempt and not much like he’s going to get on with the purpose of his visit. A minute of expectant waiting later, Wonwoo coughs. “So, what did you want?”

“Oh yeah.” Soonyoung snaps and points an eager finger gun at Wonwoo’s chest. “Since you don’t remember anything”—the way he says it betrays just the slimmest hint of sympathy, but it’s enough to make Wonwoo’s spine stiffen—“that means you’ve never heard _Africa_ by Toto, right?”

“Where by what?”

“Unreal.” In an instant, Soonyoung is at Wonwoo’s bedside, plump fingers wrapping around his wrist and pulling with all the might they can muster. “Come on. You need to hear it.”

“Why come on?” Wonwoo asks, but he lets himself be pulled anyway, feet finding the floor cold even through his slippers. “Where are we going?”

“The playground in the pediatric ward,” Soonyoung explains as he leads them into the hall. “The acoustics are really good.”

“We’re gonna bother the actual kids.”

“There aren’t gonna be any kids there,” Soonyoung scoffs, and Wonwoo notices that his wrist is still captive, looped in the planet’s warmest cuff. It feels like it might break. “And if there are, we won’t be bothering them. We’ll be doing them a favor.”

The playground is all the way across the hospital, in the opposite wing and one floor down, and Wonwoo feels like he’s never spent so much time walking in his life. He’s surprised by just how big this hospital is, wonders how many floors it goes up and how many patients are on all of them, wonders if he’ll ever even see all of it. He’s also surprised by how many windows there are bridging between the two wings. Across the street, he can see the same park that’s visible from his room getting farther away from them, dotted with towering trees and their vibrant clouds of summer leaves. Today’s sky is a screaming blue Wonwoo can feel in his ears, shouting its beauty at him, and he wonders how hot it is out there and if anyone is at that park. Maybe he’d like to try going there one day.

As Soonyoung predicted, the playground is empty of children, inhabited only by what little playground furnishings they can fit indoors. An elephant slide, a pathetic little seesaw, one of those little springy spaceship things only babies can fit in. Large letter blocks sit around on the floor without much organization, one set lined up in the far corner to spell the word _HOTDOT_. Wonwoo snorts when he sees it. Is the G missing, or did some little kid just forget? He may never know.

They sit in a few chairs pushed up against the right wall, staring directly across at a large mural of a cartoon giraffe and all its other cartoon animal friends, and Soonyoung pulls out his phone and taps away at it. He cradles it in his hand like something precious, speaker pointed directly toward the giraffe’s eyes, and places a finger over his lips for Wonwoo’s benefit. Wonwoo waits.

It starts off gently. Soft chords, something like a marimba dancing up and down the scale. When the vocals come in, they’re a little sandy, just a bit quiet, backed by keyboard. The chorus drives when they get to it, and Wonwoo pines for the nostalgia this song so badly wants to make him feel. No matter the way the flute solo catches him off-guard or the passion dripping from the chorus draws a line of goosebumps up his back, it doesn’t stir anything deeper. The song reaches its close with the dampening of the very same chords that brought them in, and Soonyoung lets them ring in the silence for a while.

“So?” he says eventually. Both cheeks are full of smile. Wonwoo tries to return it, but he can’t tell how well he’s doing. The stretch in his lips feels unnatural.

“It was good.” Soonyoung blinks at him.

“That’s it?”

“What do you want me to say?” Wonwoo picks at the bottom of his gown, a loose blue string. Endless. He pulls forever, but it never comes all the way out. “That it changed my life?”

“I mean… maybe?” Soonyoung shrugs and sinks lower in his chair. Across from them, the giraffe stares back with empty eyes. “It’s just like… you know, you’re a whole new person now. Like, from before whatever happened. You know?” He sighs. Defeated. “Isn’t everything changing your life?”

Wonwoo fixes his gaze on the giraffe too, on those eyes that don’t see, the smile that doesn’t feel. Maybe he’s right. For a long time, they sit in the chairs without talking. The buzz of the building starts to build itself inside Wonwoo’s bones, coiling through marrow and stretching through every rib, taking him in as one more gray brick in the maze. After eons, two parents usher in their tiny child, no older than three; the kid immediately kicks down _HOTDOT_. Wonwoo and Soonyoung get up to leave.

 

Despite the way it makes his skin crawl in want of something he can’t touch, Wonwoo can’t get the song off his mind. The flute part in particular keeps coming back to him, over and over again, and he just wishes he could have something else in his head. A memory, a dream, a birthday, a favorite movie. Nothing comes. There’s nothing but this song, no other brush to paint the blank canvas he’s become.

“Is talking to Soonyoung helping at all?” Dr. Josh asks a few days later. He always looks the same, eyes twinkling and smile gently curled, but Wonwoo can’t help but feel like it’s just a shell. He must be waning somewhere underneath that. Nobody wants to be stuck with an unhelpable cause. Not even the kindest doctor on earth.

“I don’t know,” Wonwoo fibs. He means no. Dr. Josh might be able to tell. “Have you ever heard a song called _Africa_?”

“By Toto?” He doesn’t hide his surprise.

“Yeah.”

“Sure, I’ve heard it.” His smile becomes a question, pen lowered to pad and ready to scribble notes. “Why do you ask?”

“Soonyoung made me listen to it the other day.” Wonwoo lies back and starts counting the dots on the ceiling, but he loses track before thirty every time. “It’s stuck in my head.”

“It’s a good song.” When Wonwoo doesn’t continue, Dr. Josh flips his notes closed again. That page must be totally empty, Wonwoo guesses. That entire book. “Maybe if you listen to it again you’ll get it out of your head.”

“Maybe.” He closes his eyes, and Dr. Josh puffs out a breath. His shoes are loud on the tile like always when he stands up.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Wonwoo.” Five footsteps and a pause. “Make sure you don’t forget to eat.” And then he leaves. Wonwoo never forgets to eat; he doesn’t understand why Dr. Josh always feels the need to remind him.

Instead of going to the cafeteria right away, though, he slides off the bed and crouches beside his box of things from home. Pair by pair, he feels every pocket for the cellphone he knows he has to have somewhere. Jeans, sweats, khakis. He doesn’t find it until he gives up on pockets and starts rifling around the bottom of the box, ice cold to stand out from the cardboard beneath it. As he presses down on the power button with one fingertip, he hopes there’s still charge in it somewhere. A sigh of relief escapes him when he sees the screen light up from black to white.

It takes a while for the phone to warm up to its newfound wakefulness, icons slowly blinking along the black bar at the top until they all seem ready to go. Then it starts buzzing in his hand—messages, missed calls. He guesses he has been out of commission for a little while. Thumb shaking, he taps the message icon and looks at all the glowing unread messages, all the names he doesn’t recognize with no faces to attach them to. Down he scrolls, and there are so many it makes him dizzy, so many his ears start to ring. Eyes closed, he exits the messages app and slips the phone in his pocket. With one determined breath, he is out the door.

The playground is just as empty today as it had been the time before, though more kempt. No blocks are strewn around now, this time all neatly packed into a bin beside the entrance. Wonwoo finds the chair he sat in before and pulls his phone out of his pocket, navigates to the _Africa_ music video. Carefully, he mimics what he remembers Soonyoung did, aims the speaker toward the giraffe’s face and holds the phone like it’s a fragile baby. He shuts his eyes while he listens to it.

If this song is a feeling, it’s the only one he knows. He plays it over and over again every time it stops, lets the flute and the keyboard and the everything run through him in circles. Without looking, he can feel the way the giraffe’s eyes watch him, hear the footsteps coming down the hallway toward him. He hears the footsteps and the creak of a door, and it’s not until he hears something ease into the chair next to him that his eyes flutter open.

“I knew you liked it more than you were letting on,” Soonyoung says. His eyes are catching the light like sequins in the wake of the toothy grin below them. He nudges Wonwoo with his shoulder. “You love it.”

“It’s been stuck in my head.”

“Yeah, sure,” Soonyoung hums. “Excuses.”

“Why are you here anyway?”

“Am I not allowed?” Wonwoo rolls his eyes, but Soonyoung keeps smiling back at him.  “I went to your room, but you weren’t there. I had a feeling you’d be here.” Something in the center of Wonwoo’s chest squirms. Soonyoung’s gaze softens, broadens to hold all of Wonwoo at once, and it gets worse. “But I wasn’t expecting to find you sitting like that, eyes closed and all. You looked like a statue.”

Wonwoo cracks a grin. “Pretty sexy, right?” Before he finishes saying it, Soonyoung is already erupting in laughter, the hearty kind that shakes the building’s foundations.

“Oh, plenty.” It makes Wonwoo’s ears tingle. “Say, sexy, wanna hear some other songs?” he asks, nodding toward the phone. “I’ve got plenty more where _Africa_ came from.” He wiggles his fingers expectantly, and without his smile wavering an inch, Wonwoo hands Soonyoung the phone.

 

Plenty is an understatement. Soonyoung explains that his parents thought it might help him remember if he listened to music he used to listen to in high school, so they brought him all the CD’s they could find in his old bedroom. It’s along the same lines of what Wonwoo’s parents did bringing him books, but Wonwoo has eyes and Soonyoung doesn’t have a CD player, so he looks up every song on his phone and listens to it. Then he makes Wonwoo listen to it.

“I haven’t remembered anything yet,” Soonyoung tells him while they listen to another song Wonwoo’s never heard of, “but I really like listening to all of it.” Wonwoo sneaks another look at the title— _Mountain Sounds_ , it’s called. He likes this one. Soonyoung furrows his brow. “But I do wonder, like, if I like it now.”

“I thought you said you did like it,” Wonwoo teases with a grin. Soonyoung smiles back, but it dampens too quickly, and Wonwoo’s lungs contract.

“I mean, _I_ like it, but I mean…” The hand not holding the phone turns in circles through the air. “I wonder if the me _before_ my accident still liked it. You know?”

“Oh.” Wonwoo looks at the giraffe, and its smile seems mocking now. Smug. That bastard hasn’t forgotten a thing. “Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“What happened?” When Soonyoung doesn’t say anything, he goes on. “Your accident, I mean.” Soonyoung stays silent. “Sorry. You don’t have to tell me.”

“Nah,” Soonyoung says with a shrug “It’s fine. Let’s just leave the playground.” He tilts his chin at the giraffe. “I’m tired of this asshole.”

They follow the hallway back the direction they came, Wonwoo always two steps behind. Both having slippers on makes the trip so much quieter than it had been when Dr. Josh first guided Wonwoo to Soonyoung’s room. It must always sound like this every time, but Wonwoo only notices now. Maybe it’s because Soonyoung is usually saying something. But he isn’t currently. A nurse looks at them while passing by and smiles, but she doesn’t say anything. The silence is numbing Wonwoo’s ears.

A placard displaying the number 237 rings a bell even before Soonyoung pushes the door beside it open. There’s no gentleness about the way he shoves it in, like he’s walking into his own home. Wonwoo guesses maybe it is kind of his home, and he realizes he doesn’t know how long Soonyoung has been here. He doesn’t know how long he was here before he woke up, either. It’s scary not to know.

The room looks like home, too, more than Wonwoo’s does at least. Soonyoung has a box almost identical to Wonwoo’s, brimming with pants and CD’s and a few little baubles that seem like they would have been better left at home. It’s the odd albums strewn around the room that really add the personality; two sitting near the pillow, three by the window, one opened on top of the table with its lyric book propped upright. Soonyoung shuts the door behind them and shuffles to the bed, where he shoves the albums out of the way and sits down.

“How are you with looking at injuries?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Wonwoo tells him. Soonyoung rolls his eyes. “Hey, shut up. How am I supposed to know?”

“Well, what do you think?” Soonyoung amends, fidgeting with his gown. “If you had to guess.”

“I’ll guess that I’m probably fine with it, then. Why?”

“Okay.” Soonyoung reaches behind himself while he talks. “So obviously I don’t really remember what happened,” he says, and his hands start fumbling. Is he untying the strings? “But this is what my mom told me.” Wonwoo gulps without meaning to as he watches a string pull all the way loose and the neck of the gown dips below Soonyoung’s collarbones. “I was taking something out of the oven. Lasagna or something, I don’t know. She didn’t tell me what it was.” A sharp breath snakes through Wonwoo’s nose when the robe drops fully. “I slipped and it fell on my stomach.”

All over his abdomen are splotches of spongy pink scar tissue, laces of red tracing around his chest and stomach like cobwebs. For every square inch of unflawed skin, there is just as much scar, an awful mosaic that Wonwoo winces just to look at. “I went into shock and passed out,” Soonyoung explains, “and they brought me to the hospital and tried to fix me up.” Wonwoo wonders if this really counts as fixed up. If this is as fixed up as Soonyoung will ever be.

“Does it hurt?” Wonwoo leans closer without meaning to. It’s hard to look away from something you never wanted to see, the colliding trains just adjacent to the road. His hand rises, fingers trembling, and he has no control of his arm.

“I’ve had a few weeks to heal, so not really anymore.”

Wonwoo’s arm takes that as a cue to reach forward. The skin feels weird, not quite like skin and not quite unlike it, rubbery and tough between patches of smooth. Even as he runs his fingertips gently over it, he wonders if it really doesn’t hurt much. The ruddy flush of it seems like it still would anyway, even after a few weeks or forever, the odd way it warps around itself in subtle ridges and rough spots.

“Sure, Wonwoo,” Soonyoung mumbles. “You can totally touch my messed up stomach.”

“Oh, great. Thanks for the permission.”

“Maybe next time you should ask for it, eh, bud?”

Wonwoo glances up and away from the outline of his hand against marred flesh. Soonyoung’s face is pink, pinker than usual. It’s edging near his hair in hue, and looking at it makes Wonwoo smile. Makes his cheeks warm, too. His whole body warm. He has to look away because his throat feels too tight, and when he does, he pats the mess of tangled tissue on Soonyoung’s stomach.

“Sure thing, sexy.” Above him, Soonyoung guffaws loud enough to hear from across the street.

 

Wonwoo learns about himself that he is a very fast reader. He reads three and a half books in two days sandwiched between visits from Dr. Josh and Soonyoung dragging him to the playground to listen to Death Cab for Cutie, and he likes all of them. Something tugs at his brain in the climactic scenes, something that tells him he’s heard this somewhere, but he can’t bring himself to come up with where or when, can’t get anywhere past the dusty inkling of yes, maybe, sometime.

It can’t be helping that Soonyoung is always somewhere in the corner of his thoughts. He flips the page, and he remembers all the scarring on his stomach. Another, and it’s the way he closes his eyes sometimes when he plays a song, the way a tiny smile will tug at his lips. Another, the vibrant red that decorated his cheeks when he looked down at Wonwoo that time. Another and another and another, more and more and more. It would be nice at least to have some memories to dilute it, but no dice. All he ever gets is heavy brush strokes, deliberate lines across confused canvas. That flute solo and Soonyoung.

He’s pushing his nose through the latter half of this book and Soonyoung deeper into that corner when his door swings violently inward. Dr. Josh has already come by, so he knows who’s here without looking. Not that Dr. Josh ever slams the door open like that. Wonwoo closes his eyes and breathes out before he shuts the book and turns to look at Soonyoung in the doorway. He’s smiling like always, one hand bracing himself against the jamb and the other proud on his hip.

“Howdy,” Wonwoo says.

“You know, I keep getting the feeling you’re not very surprised to see me.”

“Am I supposed to be surprised?” He places his hands on either side of his mouth, drops his jaw, raises his eyebrows. “How about this?”

“Maybe not surprised,” Soonyoung grumbles, stroking his chin. “Excited. You don’t seem excited.”

“I’m thrilled out of my mind.”

“See, I just don’t buy that.” His eyes crinkle in the wake of the beam at his lips. “But whatever. Come with me.”

Instead of the playground, they go to Soonyoung’s room this time. While they walk, he flicks his gaze back and forth, sure to flash disarming grins at every nurse and visitor they pass, and it makes Wonwoo nervous. The suspicious behavior continues even after they reach the room, Soonyoung shutting his door completely with deliberate care to keep it from making a sound.

“What are we doing in here?” Wonwoo whispers.

“What?”

“Why are you acting so weird?”

“I’m not.” He wilts under the look Wonwoo gives him. Wonwoo has to choke back the laughter so he won’t ruin the effect, but it gives him a tough time. “Okay, okay. It’s my birthday—”

“Oh, really?”

“I’m not done!” After a few silent seconds of assurance Wonwoo won’t say any more, he continues. “It’s my birthday and I got my uncle to bring this in for me even though I know my mom wouldn’t want me to have it.” Slowly, he moves his pillow aside to reveal a plastic container. More important than the container is the cake inside, chocolate and very poorly frosted.

“Did your uncle make that?”

“Isn’t he nice?” Soonyoung gushes. “Anyway, I swiped some forks from the cafeteria.” His eyes flash with something that stirs heat dead in the center of Wonwoo’s chest. “So let’s dig in.”

Eating out of the same container while trying not to cover the room in crumbs is a new level of difficulty. They sit on the bed while they eat, knees touching, Tupperware bin between them, foreheads almost bumping as they lean down to shovel each bite into their mouths. Wonwoo doesn’t have much of a standard to judge by, but the cake is pretty tasty. At any rate, it’s a far cry better than what they usually have in the cafeteria. But that doesn’t mean they can eat it all in one go. Still a little over half remains when they lean back on their palms, bellies full and bridging on sore.

“Happy birthday, by the way,” Wonwoo says.

“Thanks.” Soonyoung pats his gut with pride. “The big two-oh,” he sighs dreamily. “Double digits, finally.” Wonwoo raises his eyebrows. “Don’t say what I know you’re about to say. Just don’t say it.”

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“I absolutely do.” Soonyoung snorts. “I know you better than you even know yourself, Wonwoo.” The thought breaks something in him, but he doesn’t pay it any mind. He knows Soonyoung didn’t mean for it to be so heavy.

“I was gonna say I didn’t realize our birthdays were so close,” Wonwoo says with a sneer. Soonyoung’s eyes soften. “Mine is on the seventeenth of next month.”

“So I’m older than you.”

“Technically, yes.”

Soonyoung doesn’t say anything right away, just pokes at the remaining cake with his fork. Gradually, he scrapes at the side, until a tiny pile of crumbs gathers, and then he flattens it to the bottom. Scrape and press. Again and again. He builds up a little piece of smashed crumbs and pops it into his mouth. “Do you want anything for your birthday?” he asks at last.

“I don’t know,” Wonwoo hums. “To remember.” His head swims, and he has to close his eyes. “Or to know what happened, at least.”

“You don’t know what happened?”

“My parents won’t tell me.” When he opens his eyes, Soonyoung’s gaze is fixed on his face, lips pouting, eyes swirling. Wonwoo’s stomach hurts, and it’s not the cake.

“Maybe Dr. Josh knows,” Soonyoung suggests softly. “You could ask him.”

“I guess.” A minute of silence suffocates them.

“Is there anything more concrete that you want?” he tries again. “Like a cake, or a book, or… I don’t know, something else you like?”

“Why are you asking?”

“Just tell me.” It lessens the load on Wonwoo’s shoulders to see him smiling again, but not by much.

“I want to leave the hospital.” He waits for Soonyoung to say something, but quiet continues to sing overtop the building’s usual buzz. “Is that concrete enough for you?”

“I mean, it’s definitely more concrete,” Soonyoung muses. “Who knows, though? You might be out of here before your birthday.”

Wonwoo hadn’t thought about that, but it’s true. They originally said a few weeks, and another month could definitely qualify as that, but it could also be less time. It’s already been about two weeks, he thinks, and there’s no way they can plan on keeping him much longer than that. Not if he isn’t making any progress. The thought of seeing his own house for the first time tangles his spine.

“That would be nice,” he says, but when he looks in Soonyoung’s eyes, it doesn’t seem as nice. When he looks at the downward turn of his lips. At the shy pink crawling up his neck. The slump of his shoulders. It’s not a very nice thing at all. “Say,” he coughs, “do you know how much longer you’re going to be here?”

Soonyoung shrugs. “No idea.” His fingers ghost over the front of his gown, and Wonwoo’s eyes flash with twisted pink. “I’ve already been here a while.” Healing burns takes time—Wonwoo’s sure it has been a while. So how much time is left? Soonyoung nudges him with his foot. “Hey, you know what, though?”

“What?”

“This is the first birthday I get to remember since I turned eleven.” His eyes perk up toward the cheer his lips can’t quite muster. “That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

“I guess you’re right,” Wonwoo hums. A grin forms on his lips without notice. “Happy twelfth birthday.”

“Oh, thanks,” Soonyoung snorts. “I always hoped I’d get to spend my twelfth b-day eating cake on a hospital bed with a nice, sexy man.”

“Dreams really do come true, huh?”

Soonyoung’s laughter is infectious. It dances into Wonwoo through the toes at his shin, shakes up his limbs until he’s rattling with it. It seems to Wonwoo that their laughter is the loudest noise in the whole hospital, mattress shaking below them, and it doesn’t stop easily once they’ve gotten going. Something about Soonyoung’s eyes on him feels like a dream, something about his puffy smile, and Wonwoo wonders whether it really will come true.

 

Three days is the amount of time it takes Wonwoo to beef up the guts to ask Dr. Josh what happened to him. Hands clammy and folded in his lap, he darts his eyes everywhere in the room but at his guest, especially not into those eyes. They’re always so shiny and soft with hope, and he doesn’t want to watch them dampen.

“Your parents didn’t want me to tell you that,” he muses, thumbing at the corner of his clipboard. “They didn’t want it to make you feel worse.”

“Feel worse?” Wonwoo’s eyes still climb around the corners of the ceiling. “How could it feel worse than not even knowing myself?” He hears Dr. Josh’s fingertips tapping at the top of his clipboard, the click of a pen.

“I think you know yourself, Wonwoo,” he says carefully. Wonwoo feels like glaring, but he can’t bring himself to. The smile on Dr. Josh’s face is lukewarm and waning, and he looks so tired. “And I want to tell you, but this really puts me in a spot.”

“Don’t I deserve to know?”

“You do.” The pen clicks keep up their steady pace, a lifeless heartbeat, subdued but impossible to ignore. Maybe that’s a nervous habit of his. “But your parents are your guardians, technically, even if you are an adult.” Color drains from his cheeks when he sighs. “It’s hard to know what the right thing to do is here.”

“Please just tell me,” Wonwoo begs. “I won’t tell them I know. What if it helps me remember something?”

“Is that really what you want to remember?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. Wonwoo is talking before he thinks about talking. “I don’t care what it is. I just want to remember _something_.”

Dr. Josh heaves a breath, but this time, his smile regains some of its vitality. “Alright,” he says. “I’ll tell you, just this time. But only because there’s a chance it might help you, okay? Your health and recovery as a patient is my priority.”

“I always knew you were cool, Dr. Josh.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He folds the pages of his clipboard down, but the pen clicking doesn’t stop. “You need to let me know anything this helps you remember, Wonwoo.”

“Will do.” With one final click of the pen, Dr. Josh sets it down and folds his hands in his lap. He fixes Wonwoo with a gentle smile. He starts talking.

Wonwoo had been driving, apparently, over to a friend’s place to celebrate a birthday. The light changed from red to green, but a truck coming from the right missed the cue to stop and plowed right into him. His car crumpled like an aluminum can. They veered together across the intersection and into a telephone pole at the corner of a field, pushed it down, finally skidded to a stop in the grass. Miraculously, Wonwoo made it out with only a concussion, but the road didn’t end there. He slipped into a coma for four days before he woke up without his memories. The other driver died in the wreck. The telephone pole was fixed by the next week, but you can still see the muddy trenches the tires left in the grass.

When Dr. Josh finishes explaining, he looks at Wonwoo with a wary gaze, ready to note any reaction, but Wonwoo doesn’t know how to react. Can he regret the loss of a car he never knew he had? Can he mourn the death of a guy he wouldn’t know even if he could remember? And he still can’t remember. All the details, the story, everything, and his head is full of nothing but fuzz. It’s not something that happened to him. It’s a story about someone else, someone he’ll never meet. Silence soaks in through his skin.

“How do you feel?” Dr. Josh asks after a while. Wonwoo shrugs.

“The same.” It’s hard to be so disappointed when he knows Dr. Josh is just doing his best, but it’s harder not to be disappointed when nothing ever works. “I still don’t remember any of it.” He wants to say more, but his tongue sits like lead in the bottom of his mouth. Instead of asking, Dr. Josh stands up and rests a hand on his shoulder. Wonwoo doesn’t look at his face.

“I know you’re down,” he says. Down is such a soft term for the feeling, Wonwoo thinks. He expects Dr. Josh to say something else, something to undercut and reassure him, but he must know by now that Wonwoo’s not so easy to reassure. So he doesn’t try. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he tells him instead. “Make sure you don’t forget to eat.” His footsteps click out into the hallway, and Wonwoo is alone.

He thought knowing would help. But he’s learning more and more that the things he thinks will help don’t always do the trick. With another glance at the gray of the wall, he falls onto his back and looks up at the ceiling. Always the stupid ceiling. Surely the summer sky must be nicer. If only he could see it, that screaming blue, maybe it would help him remember something. But maybe it wouldn’t. Soft footfalls meet his ears the second his eyes shut.

“Hey, hot stuff,” comes Soonyoung’s voice. Wonwoo leaves his eyes closed, but he can feel Soonyoung drifting in with inaudible steps. “What’s going on?”

“Not much.”

“Are you alright?” He sounds worried now. Before Wonwoo can answer, he lets himself up to sit on the bed, a warm inch away from Wonwoo’s calves. His hand is somewhere next to Wonwoo’s abdomen, toying with the blanket.

“I’m fine.”

Soonyoung hums. “I smell a liar.” When Wonwoo cracks his eyes open, Soonyoung is smiling warily down at him, cheeks pink and puffed out. His hand moves from the blanket to Wonwoo’s stomach, and butterflies start dancing under the skin where his palm lands. “What’s wrong?” he tries again.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Wonwoo sighs. “I got Dr. Josh to tell me what happened?”

“Oh, really?” Soonyoung asks, excitement wilting when he remembers that Wonwoo doesn’t seem so happy. “What was it?” he says, voice small.

“I got hit by a car.” Saying it himself doesn’t bring anything to the surface either, just another removed narrative about a stranger who’s gone now. “Somebody in a truck T-boned me at an intersection and I went into a coma and woke up here.” All fuzzy edges and fuzzier pictures, an endless web of nothing. “The other guy died.”

“Jesus,” Soonyoung whistles. “That’s crazy.” His hand pats Wonwoo’s stomach once, very firmly, and the skin on Wonwoo’s face goes up in flames. “But you’re alive! That’s pretty lucky, right?”

“Is it really?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, _I’m_ alive,” Wonwoo begins, voice hot, “but it’s like the guy who I was before died and I just came back instead. And that’s not what anybody wanted.” He sighs. “And it sucks.”

“But you’re still you, though, I think. Even if you don’t remember anything.”

“But how? I don’t even know what makes me myself.” He closes his eyes again. “Can we not talk about this anymore?” Soonyoung doesn’t say anything right away, but he also doesn’t move his hand off Wonwoo. For a while, they do nothing but sit, unspeaking, Soonyoung’s hand rising and falling with each of Wonwoo’s breaths. Sometimes he feels like all his time spent with Soonyoung is in silence, and sometimes he feels like it’s never quiet.

“Do you want to do something?” Soonyoung says eventually.

“Like what?” Wonwoo opens his eyes back up, and Soonyoung is looking at him, smile tentative. “I don’t really feel like going to the playground right now.” The thought of that damn giraffe leering at him makes his stomach turn.

“We don’t have to go there,” Soonyoung mutters, searching the room. “We can just stay here.”

“And do what?”

“I don’t know.” Soonyoung’s eye catches on something in the corner. Wonwoo’s unkempt pants box, the books stacked up haphazardly beside it. “Hey, why don’t you read me something?”

“What, like a bedtime story?”

“Like something out of one of those, maybe?” he says, nodding his head at the pile. “I don’t think I’ve read any of them.”

Wonwoo stares past him to the corner and chews at his lip. “Alright.” He pushes himself to sit upright, leaning back on his palms. “Go over and pick one out, and I’ll read it to you.”

“Awesome.” Soonyoung heaves himself off the mattress and shuffles over to eyes the stack. He’s careful, running his finger under the title on every spine while he considers his options in thoughtful silence. After a long stretch of staring at the books and being stared at by Wonwoo in turn, he pulls one out and waddles back over. “Okay. I pick this one.”

“That explains why you pulled it out and brought it over.” It smacks into Wonwoo’s chest with a thud and forces the breath straight out of him. While Soonyoung smirks at him, he inspects the cover. He doesn’t think he’s read this one yet, a bit lower on his to-read list than most of the others. Even though he knows he liked it before, it looks a little dry. “You’re sure about this one?”

“Totally.” He climbs back on the cot and folds his legs under himself, eyes trained on Wonwoo like a toddler’s on a mall Santa. They’re shining, those eyes, everything about them. Wonwoo doesn’t mean to smile so wide, but he can’t stop himself.

“Where do you want me to start?” he asks, thumbing through the pages. Old and worn. Soft. Maybe he read this more than once, back in the day. “The beginning?”

“Yeah,” Soonyoung hums, propping his chin in his hands. “The beginning.” So Wonwoo opens to page one, takes in a breath, and starts reading.

He doesn’t pay attention to the words. Each one flows into his eyes and out of his mouth, a ceaseless flood as Soonyoung sits listening across from him, eyes closed and lips a gentle arc. Somehow, he seems less like an audience and more like a fixture in the room, a beautiful flower blooming from the middle of the blanket on his bed. Wonwoo hears his voice the same way he had the first time he said his own name, echoing around through empty space, but he can’t shake the feeling that it sounds impossibly different. It sounds now like it’s coming from somewhere, like it belongs to somebody. When he stumbles on a word, Soonyoung chuckles, and the corners of Wonwoo’s lips lift right in time.

 

His parents visit more than usual in the next week, which Wonwoo takes a sign he’ll be heading home soon. It feels like something he should probably tell Soonyoung, but he doesn’t know how to do it. Maybe he shouldn’t. It would definitely be easier to just not bring up. But when he thinks about Soonyoung sprinting over to play him a new song and finding the room empty, it makes his stomach tighten. It shouldn’t be such a big deal, but it is. Wonwoo figures he’ll wait at least until Dr. Josh tells him officially, or his parents do. That doesn’t stop him from losing sleep over it.

Soonyoung dashes in one day only moments after Dr. Josh has walked out. His smile looks like it’s hiding something, but Wonwoo can’t hazard a guess at what it might be. He beams while Wonwoo looks him over, squirming with excitement.

“I see Dr. Josh just left you,” he observes. Wonwoo raises his eyebrows.

“Yeah. Why are you acting so weird?”

“I’m a weird guy, Wonwoo.”

“Well, that’s true, but you know…” As he shifts, a lump becomes visible beneath the front of his gown, standing out proudly against his stomach. “What the fuck is under your gown?”

Soonyoung bursts into hearty laughter as he pulls out the cargo, quieting swiftly to hushed giggles, and holds it forward for Wonwoo to see. Shirts, two of them, slightly wrinkled but clean. Wonwoo narrows his eyes.

“Why do you have two shirts?”

“Why do you think?” He tosses one to Wonwoo, maroon and decorated on the front with a picture of a Bob-omb from _Mario_. Wonwoo realizes this is the first unworn shirt he has ever laid eyes on.

“I have no idea.”

“Come on, Wonwoo, use your noodle.” Soonyoung shuts his door and pulls his gown off, balling it up on the floor. Wonwoo tries not to look too hard at his stomach. “We’re getting out of here.”

“What?” He looks on as Soonyoung calmly unfolds his own shirt and starts putting his arms through the sleeves. “Soonyoung, no way. That is not allowed.”

“Don’t you want to leave?” he asks, frozen where he’s about to put his head through the hole.

“I mean, yeah,” Wonwoo allows, “but, you know, legally?” Soonyoung snorts.

“Relax. We’re just going across the street.”

“Across the street?”

“To the park.” Soonyoung points out the window at it, red slide glimmering in the light. “Don’t you want to see outside?”

“I mean…” He sighs in resignation. “Yeah.”

“Yeah.” Soonyoung smiles at him. His face is still ruddy, from excitement or running over or something else. Wonwoo gulps. “Don’t worry, we’ll be back in like twenty minutes. Nobody will even know we’re gone.”

With a deep breath in, Wonwoo succumbs and unfolds the shirt and gawks. It’s enormous. Looking at Soonyoung, his is just as much a tent. “Where did you even get these?”

“My uncle,” he says proudly. “What a guy, right?” Wonwoo looks between him and the shirt a few times before he frowns. “What, okay, so he’s not the smallest guy in the world. Just put it on.”

It’s lucky the nurses in this wing are always sparse, because Wonwoo knows they all recognize both of them by now, and there’s definitely something suspicious about seeing two inpatients creeping toward the stairwell with XXL shirts where their gowns should be. Soonyoung leads them down the hall, steps as quiet as he can manage, and slips the door open, looking back and forth all the while. Wonwoo is grateful they only have two floors to go down out of the possible nine.

Getting out of the hospital seems too easy, but nobody at the desks recognizes them, so they stroll out like it’s no big deal. Somebody should say something, Wonwoo thinks, with the way Soonyoung still glances around every few seconds, but nobody seems to care enough. Before Wonwoo knows it, they’re stepping out into the sunshine. It’s not until then that he realizes hospital slippers are a bad choice for outdoor footwear, but Soonyoung doesn’t let him care. He grabs him by the wrist and leads him across the street.

Being outside is surreal. It’s warmer than Wonwoo thought it would be, bridging on hot, and he’s glad the shirt is too big to start sticking to him anywhere but on top of the shoulders. The sky is empty save for a few thin clouds, and it shouts its blue at him, demanding attention from his eyes and blinding them away in the same breath. When he inhales, he notices the air out here tastes different, sweeter, and he doesn’t want to go back to the hospital ever, even if all his stuff is there. He’d love to just keep walking forward forever and see what else there is.

Soonyoung leads them to a little alcove at the back of the jungle gym, facing away from the hospital. Wonwoo is surprised there aren’t more kids here, but if the playground inside is anything to note, he guesses playing near hospitals isn’t very enticing. The shade where they sit down is warm, occasionally privy to a cool breeze, and dusty dirt grabs onto their pants when it gets kicked up. Soonyoung fishes something out of his pocket and places it in Wonwoo’s hand gently.

“Happy birthday, Wonwoo!” he says.

It’s a brownie from the cafeteria. Wonwoo doesn’t remember when they had these recently or if he even got one when they did, but here it sits on his palm, wrapped in plastic and slightly smushed from its journey in Soonyoung’s jeans. He unfolds it carefully and takes a smile bite off the corner, closing his eyes. So much sweeter than applesauce.

“You did this for my birthday?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Soonyoung tells him, cheeks a shy pink. “I know it’s early, but I feel like you’re gonna be discharged soon, so I didn’t wanna miss my chance. How’s the brownie?”

“It’s good.” He almost takes another bite but holds it forward instead. “Do you want some?”

“No, you eat it. It’s your birthday present.”

“Are you sure?”

“Totally.” He doesn’t look totally sure, but Wonwoo keeps eating it anyway. Crumbs spill off his fingers and onto his lap, but he doesn’t think he minds them, not with the sky shining bright blue all around them, the trees’ green leaves glowing in his periphery. Soonyoung’s hair looks even more blazing under sunlight, and so does his smile. Wonwoo has to squint.

“I feel kinda bad now,” he says, “since I didn’t get you anything for your birthday.”

“It’s okay.” Wind ruffles Soonyoung’s hair, and he looks like a flower. “I really just wanted to thank you.”

“Thank me?”

“Yeah.” He tangles his thumbs in the hem of his huge shirt and looks down at his knees. Now his cheeks are even darker, and it makes Wonwoo’s color, too. “It’s been so nice to have you around. Like, it’s really helped.” Round and round goes the fabric in his hand, bunching up inside his fist. “I mean, I still don’t remember anything else, but I just… I don’t know.” He squeezes his eyes shut, and a tear pops out because of it, rolls down for a second before he swipes it away. “God, sorry.” Wonwoo’s chest is a circus cage, and his heart is a lion. “I’m just sad you’re gonna be leaving.”

“Hey.” Wonwoo reaches out to put his hand on Soonyoung’s, and it’s trembling. He realizes he’s shaking, too. “I might still have a while.”

“I know,” he blubbers, tears now flowing recklessly down to his chin, “but it’s still not…” He coughs and wipes at his eyes in vain. Tears keep coming. “We both have to leave sometime, and I know that, but I just… like having you around.” His voice is muffled when he resorts to using the collar of his shirt as a rag. “And I don’t care if you feel like you’re not anybody since you can’t remember. I like the you that you are.” Shirt soaked, he drops it back down to show his face. It’s splotchy and frowning, and his eyebrows are knit into an unhappy line, but Wonwoo’s heart is swollen in a way it hasn’t been before. “Fuck the old Wonwoo.”

A laugh bursts through Wonwoo’s lips, straight from the stomach. “I bet you’d like that, huh?” Soonyoung lowers his eyebrows.

“Not with the _old_ Wo—wait, I mean…” He takes a swing when Wonwoo’s laugh gets louder, missing his shoulder and landing harmlessly in Wonwoo’s hand instead. “Asshole,” he grumbles. “Don’t pick on me when I’m crying.”

“So it’s okay when you stop crying?” Soonyoung groans. “Hey, Soonyoung.”

“What?”

Wonwoo is in the middle of thinking of something to say when his body decides it wants to lurch. Forward and forward, until he hits Soonyoung. Gently, right at the mouth. Soonyoung looks surprised; Wonwoo is surprised. But his free hand flits to Soonyoung’s shoulder and his busy hand holds Soonyoung’s just a little tighter and he doesn’t let go. A light breeze sends ripples through their oversized shirts. Above them, the sky sings its brilliant blue. After a few slow beats, Wonwoo blinks and leans back.

“Uh?” Soonyoung says. His face and his hair have lost their distinction.

“I don’t know,” Wonwoo tells him.

“You kissed me.”

“Yeah.” Wonwoo knows his own cheeks must be flaming red, but he tries to focus on everything else. The sky. The trees. A bird warbling in one of the trees. Soonyoung. “I don’t know,” he repeats. “I just… I mean, we’ll still be existing after we leave the hospital, right?” Warmth on his palm reminds him he’s still holding Soonyoung’s hand, and it makes him nervous, so he lets go. “Just… call me.”

For a minute, Soonyoung stares at him with wide eyes, still puffy from crying. Then he snaps into a smug grin. “You like me,” he asserts. Wonwoo rolls his eyes. As if they aren’t both cherry red right now.

“We need to go back.”

“Don’t be like that,” Soonyoung says, shoving his arm. “I already cried because of you.” His grin sparkles in the sunshine, and so does the rest of him. He clamps a hand around Wonwoo’s wrist and pulls him to his feet. “Come on, let’s at least go on the swings first.” Wonwoo mulls it over.

“Only if you push me,” he says, and Soonyoung sighs.

“Sure, sexy,” he sings, “I’ll push you. Since this is your birthday party and all.” His first birthday party, Wonwoo thinks.

The swing set is fully visible from the hospital. If Dr. Josh looks out and sees them, he’ll lose his mind. Or maybe he won’t even be surprised. But it doesn’t matter either way. Wonwoo closes his eyes, and he loves the feeling of sunshine on his skin even if it’s almost stifling. Soonyoung’s palms are firm at his back where they push him up, over and over again, and he wants to remember this feeling. Even if he loses the rest of it all over again. And he doesn’t want to get the rest of it back if it means covering this up.

Maybe Dr. Josh was right when he said it wasn’t a bad thing not to be normal. Maybe it isn’t so bad to forget, to remember, to change. Soonyoung’s laughter echoes, bounces off the plastic structures filling the playground; it’s no flute solo, but it certainly is music. Wonwoo takes in a big breath of the bright blue sky, and he feels lucky to be alive.

**Author's Note:**

> happy winterstar everybody!!! i hope the new year is finding all of you well and i hope you're being able to enjoy all this fresh new soonwoo content winterstar is bringing us... i actually had a really great time writing this and i think it's my favorite thing i have written for soonwoo to date, so i really truly hope you enjoyed reading it!! i always said someday i would write something good for the soonwoo tag... hopefully this is finally it lmao. we love soft emotional boys. anyway thank you thank you so much for taking the time to read, and i do hope you'll read the rest of the winterstar fanworks (they're being posted until the 25th of this month!) and have an excellent january to start off a beautiful new year, hopefully better than the last one. as always, feedback is greatly appreciated, and thanks so much for reading!


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